Adamson v. People of State of California, 332 U.S. 46 (1947)

Mr. Justice FRANKFURTER (concurring).

Less than 10 years ago, Mr. Justice Cardozo announced as settled
constitutional law that while the Fifth Amendment, 'which is not directed to
the States, but solely to the federal government,' provides that no person
shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witnss against himself, the
process of law assured by the Fourteenth Amendment does not require such
immunity from self-crimination: 'in prosecutions by a state, the exemption will
fail if the state elects to end it.' Palko v. Connecticut,
302
U.S. 319, 322, 324, 150, 151. Mr. Justice Cardozo spoke for the Court,
consisting of Mr. Chief Justice Hughes, and McReynolds, Brandeis, Sutherland,
Stone, Roberts, Black, JJ. ( Mr. Justice Butler dissented.) The matter no
longer called for discussion; a reference to Twining v. New Jersey,
211
U.S. 78, decided 30 years before the Palko case, sufficed.

Decisions of this Court do not have equal intrinsic authority. The Twining
case shows the judicial process at its best — comprehensive briefs and
powerful arguments on both sides, followed by long deliberation, resulting in
an opinion by Mr. Justice Moody which at once gained and has ever since
retained recognition as one of the outstanding opinions in the history of the
Court. After [332 U.S. 46,
60] enjoying unquestioned prestige for 40 years, the Twining case
should not now be diluted, even unwittingly, either in its judicial philosophy
or in its particulars. As the surest way of keeping the Twining case intact, I
would affirm this case on its authority.

The circumstances of this case present a minor variant from what was before
the Court in Twining v. United States, supra. The attempt to inflate the
difference into constitutional significance was adequately dealt with by Mr.
Justice Traynor in the court below. People v. Adamson, 27 Cal.2d 478, 165 P.2d
3. The matter lies within a very narrow compass. The point is made that a
defendant who has a vulnerable record would, by taking the stand, subject
himself to having his credibility impeached thereby. See Raffel v. United
States,
271
U.S. 494, 496, 497, 567. Accordingly, under California law, he is
confronted with the dilemma, whether to testify and perchance have his bad
record prejudice him in the minds of the jury, or to subject himself to the
unfavorable inference which the jury might draw from his silence. And so, it is
argued, if he chooses the latter alternative, the jury ought not to be allowed
to attribute his silence to a consciousness of guilt when it might be due
merely to a desire to escape damaging cross-examination.

This does not create an issue different from that settled in the Twining
case (211
U.S. 78). Only a technical rule of law would exclude from consideration
that which is relevant, as a matter of fair reasoning, to the solution of a
problem. Sensible and justminded men, in important affairs of life, deem it
significant that a man remains silent when confronted with serious and
responsible evidence against himself which it is within his power to
contradict. The notion that to allow jurors to do that which sensible and
rightminded men do every day violates the 'immutable principles of justice' as
conceived by a civilized society is to trivialize the importance of 'due
process.' Nor does it [332 U.S.
46, 61] make any difference in drawing significance from silence
under such circumstances that an accused may deem it more advantageous to
remain silent than to speak, on the nice calculation that by taking the witness
stand he may expose himself to having his credibility impugned by reason of his
criminal record. Silence under such circumstances is still significant. A
person in that situation may express to the jury, through appropriate requests
to charge, why he prefers to keep silent. A man who has done one wrong may
prove his innocence on a totally different charge. To deny that the jury can be
trusted to make such discrimination is to show little confidence in the jury
system. The prosecution is frequently compelled to rely on the testimony of
shady characters whose credibility is bound to be the chief target of the
defense. It is a common practice in criminal trials to draw out of a vulnerable
witness' mouth his vulnerability, ad then con vince the jury that nevertheless
he is telling the truth in this particular case. This is also a common
experience for defendants.

For historical reasons a limited immunity from the common duty to testify
was written into the Federal Bill of Rights, and I am prepared to agree that,
as part of that immunity, comment on the failure of an accused to take the
witness stand is forbidden in federal prosecutions. It is so, of course, by
explicit act of Congress. 20 Stat. 30, 28 U.S.C.A. 632; see Bruno v. United
States,
308
U.S. 287 . But to suggest that such a limitation can be drawn out of 'due
process' in its protection of ultimate decency in a civilized society is to
suggest that the Due Process Clause fastened fetters of unreason upon the
States. This opinion is concerned solely with a discussion of the Due Process
Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. I put to one side the Privileges or
Immunities Clause of that Amendment. For the mischievous uses to which that
clause would lend itself if its scope were not confined to that given it by all
but [332 U.S. 46, 62]
one of the decisions beginning with the Slaughter-House Cases, 16 Wall 36, see
the deviation in Colgate v. Harvey,
296
U.S. 404, 56 S. Ct. 252, 102 A.L.R. 54, overruled by Madden v. Kentucky,
309
U.S. 83, 125 A.L.R. 1383.

Between the incorporation of the Fourteenth Amendment into the Constitution
and the beginning of the present membership of the Court — a period of 70
years — the scope of that Amendment was passed upon by 43 judges. Of all
these judges, only one, who may respectfully be called an eccentric exception,
ever indicated the belief that the Fourteenth Amendment was a shorthand summary
of the first eight Amendments theretofore limiting only the Federal Government,
and that due process incorporated those eight Amendments as restrictions upon
the powers of the States. Among these judges were not only those who would have
to be included among the greatest in the history of the Court, but — it is
especially relevant to note — they included those whose services in the
cause of human rights and the spirit of freedom are the most conspicuous in our
history. It is not invidious to single out Miller, Davis, Bradley, Waite,
Matthews, Gray, Fuller, Holmes, Brandeis, Stone and Cardozo (to speak only of
the dead) as judges who were alert in safeguarding and promoting the interests
of liberty and human dignity through law. But they were also judges mindful of
the relation of our federal system to a propgressively democratic society and
therefore duly regardful of the scope of authority that was left to the States
even after the Civil War. And so they did not find that the Fourteenth
Amendment, concerned as it was with matters fundamental to the pursuit of
justice, fastened upon the States procedural arrangements which, in the
language of Mr. Justice Cardozo, only those who are 'narrow or provincial'
would deem essential to 'a fair and enlightened system of justice.' Palko v.
Connecticut,
302
U.S. 319, 325, 151, 152. To suggest that it is inconsistent with a truly
free [332 U.S. 46,
63]society to begin prosecutions without an indictment, to try petty
civil cases without the paraphernalia of a common law jury, to take into
consideration that one who has full opportunity to make a defense remains
silent is, in de Tocqueville's phrase, to confound the familiar with the
necessary.

The short answer to the suggestion that the provision of the Fourteenth
Amendment, which ordains 'nor shall any State deprive any person of life,
liberty, or property, without due process of law,' was a way of saying that
every State must thereafter initiate prosecutions through indictment by a grand
jury, must have a trial by a jury of 12 in criminal cases, and must have trial
by such a jury in common law suits where the amount in controversy exceeds $20,
is that it is a strange way of saying it. It would be extraordinarily strange
for a Consttution to convey such specific commands in such a roundabout and
inexplicit way. After all, an amendment to the Constitution should be read in a
"sense most obvious to the common understanding at the time of its
adoption.' * * * For it was for public adoption that it was proposed.' See Mr.
Justice Holmes in Eisner v. Macomber,
252
U.S. 189, 220, 197, 9 A.L.R. 1570. Those reading the Engligh language with
the meaning which it ordinarily conveys, those conversant with the political
and legal history of the concept of due process, those sensitive to the
relations of the States to the central government as well as the relation of
some of the provisions of the Bill of Rights to the process of justice, would
hardly recognize the Fourteenth Amendment as a cover for the various explicit
provisions of the first eight Amendments. Some of these are enduring
reflections of experience with human nature, while some express the restricted
views of Eighteenth-Century England regarding the best methods for the
ascertainment of facts. The notion that the Fourteenth Amendment was a covert
way of imposing upon the [332 U.S.
46, 64]States all the rules which it seemed important to Eighteenth
Century statesmen to write into the Federal Amendments, was rejected by judges
who were themselves witnesses of the process by which the Fourteenth Amendment
became part of the Constitution. Arguments that may now be adduced to prove
that the first eight Amendments were concealed within the historic
phrasing1 of the Fourteenth
Amendment were not unknown at the time of its adoption. A surer estimate of
their bearing was possible for judges at the time than distorting distance is
likely to vouchsafe. Any evidence of design or purpose not contemporaneously
known could hardly have influenced those who ratified the Amendment. Remarks of
a particular proponent of the Amendment, no matter how influential, are not to
be deemed part of the Amendment. What was submitted for ratification was his
proposal, not his speech. Thus, at the time of the ratification of the
Fourteenth Amendment the constitutions of nearly half of the ratifying States
did not have the rigorous requirements of the Fifth Amendment for instituting
criminal proceedings through a grand jury. It could hardly have occurred to
these States that by ratifying the Amendment they uprooted their established
methods for prosecuting crime and fastened upon themselves a new prosecutorial
system.

Indeed, the suggestion that the Fourteenth Amendment incorporates the first
eight Amendments as such is not unambiguously urged. Even the boldest innovator
would shrink from suggesting to more than half the States that
[332 U.S. 46, 65] they
may no longer initiate prosecutions without indictment by grand jury, or that
thereafter all the States of the Union must furnish a jury of 12 for every case
involving a claim above $20. There is suggested merely a selective
incorporation of the first eight Amendments into the Fourteenth Amendment. Some
are in and some are out, but we are left in the dark as to which are in and
which are out. Nor are we given the calculus for determining which go in and
which stay out. If the basis of selection is merely that those provisions of
the first eight Amendments are incorporated which commend themselves to
individual justices as indispensable to the dignity and happiness of a free
man, we are thrown back to a merely subjective test. The protection against
unreasonable search and seizure might have primacy for one judge, while trial
by a jury of 12 for every claim above $20 might appear to aother as a n
ultimate need in a free society. In the history of thought 'natural law' has a
much longer and much better founded meaning and justification than such
subjective selection of the first eight Amendments for incorporation into the
Fourteenth. If all that is meant is that due process contains within itself
certain minimal standards which are 'of the very essence of a scheme of ordered
liberty,' Palko v. Connecticut,
302
U.S. 319, 325, 58 S. Ct. 149, 151, 152, putting upon this Court the duty of
applying these standards from time to time, then we have merely arrived at the
insight which our predecessors long ago expressed. We are called upon to apply
to the difficult issues of our own day the wisdom afforded by the great
opinions in this field, such as those in Davidson v. New Orleans,
96
U.S. 97; Missouri v. Lewis,
101
U.S. 22; Hurtado v. California,
110
U.S. 516, 292 ; Holden v. Hardy,
169
U.S. 366; Twining v. New Jersey,
211
U.S. 78, and Palko v. Connecticut,
302
U.S. 319 . This guidance bids us to be duly mindful of the heritage of the
past, with its great lessons of how liberties are won and
[332 U.S. 46, 66] how
they are lost. As judges charged with the delicate task of subjecting the
government of a continent to the Rule of Law we must be particularly mindful
that it is 'a constitution we are expounding,' so that it should not be
imprisoned in what are merely legal forms even though they have the sanction of
the Eighteenth Century.

It may not be amiss to restate the pervasive function of the Fourteenth
Amendment in exacting from the States observance of basic liberties. See
Malinski v. New York,
324
U.S. 401, 412 et seq., 786; Louisiana v. Resweber,
329
U.S. 459, 466 et seq., 377. The Amendment neither comprehends the specific
provisions by which the founders deemed it appropriate to restrict the federal
government nor is it confined to them. The Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth
Amendment has an independent potency, precisely as does the Due Procee Clause
of the Fifth Amendment in relation to the Federal Government. It ought not to
require argument to reject the notion that due process of law meant one thing
in the Fifth Amendment and another in the Fourteenth. The Fifth Amendment
specifically prohibits prosecution of an 'infamous crime' except upon
indictment; it forbids double jeopardy; it bars compelling a person to be a
witness against himself in any criminal case; it precludes deprivation of
'life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.' Are Madison and his
contemporaries in the framing of the Bill of Rights to be charged with writing
into it a meaningless clause? To consider 'due process of law' as merely a
shorthand statement of other specific clauses in the same amendment is to
attribute to the authors and proponents of this Amendment ignorance of, or
indifference to, a historic conception which was one of the great instruments
in the arsenal of constitutional freedom which the Bill of Rights was to
protect and strengthen. [332 U.S.
46, 67] A construction which gives to due process no independent
function but turns it into a summary of the specific provisions of the Bill of
Rights would, as has been noted, tear up by the roots much of the fabric of law
in the several States, and would deprive the States of opportunity for reforms
in legal process designed for extending the area of freedom. It would assume
that no other abuses would reveal themselves in the course of time than those
which had become manifest in 1791. Such a view not only disregards the historic
meaning of 'due process.' It leads inevitably to a warped construction of
specific provisions of the Bill of Rights to bring within their scope conduct
clearly condemned by due process but not easily fitting into the pigeon-holes
of the specific provisions. It seems pretty late in the day to suggest tat a
phras e so laden with historic meaning should be given an improvised content
consisting of some but not all of the provisions of the first eight Amendments,
selected on an undefined basis, with improvisation of content for the
provisions so selected.

And so, when, as in a case like the present, a conviction in a State court
is here for review under a claim that a right protected by the Due Process
Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment has been denied, the issue is not whether an
infraction of one of the specific provisions of the first eight Amendments is
disclosed by the record. The relevant question is whether the criminal
proceedings which resulted in conviction deprived the accused of the due
process of law to which the United States Constitution entitled him. Judicial
review of that guaranty of the Fourteenth Amendment inescapably imposes upon
this Court an exercise of judgment upon the whole course of the proceedings in
order to ascertain whether they offend those canons of decency and fairness
which express the notions of justice of English-speaking peoples even toward
[332 U.S. 46, 68] those
charged with the most heinous offenses. These standards of justice are not
authoritatively formulated anywhere as though they were prescriptions in a
pharmacopoeia. But neither does the application of the Due Process Clause imply
that judges are wholly at large. The judicial judgment in applying the Due
Process Clause must move within the limits of accepted notions of justice and
is not to be based upon the idiosyncrasies of a merely personal judgment. The
fact that judges among themselves may differ whether in a particular case a
trial offends accepted notions of justice is not disproof that general rather
than idiosyncratic standards are applied. An important safeguard against such
merely individual judgment is an alert deference to the judgment of the State
court under review.

Footnotes

[Footnote 1] 'The prohibition against
depriving the citizen or subject of his life, liberty, or property without due
process of law, is not new in the constitutional history of the English race.
It is not new in the constitutional history of this country, and it was not new
in the Constitution of the United States when it became a part of the
fourteenth amendment, in the year 1866.' Davidson v. New Orleans,
96 U.S. 97, 101 .